DESCRIPTION: This research is designed to recast current discussions of the parental roles of American men and women by shifting the focus from biological to social aspects of parenting. The study will concentrate on two aspects of parental roles -- coresidence with children (for the period as a whole) and economic provider status (for the 1940-1990 period) -- that constitute the most common, most salient, and most easily measurable dimensions of demographic parenthood. The study will place current demographic parental roles within households in the context of social structural and family change, illuminating the differences and changes in the trajectories of black and white families in America. The study will use newly released census public use data files for the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (the Integrated Public Use Micro Samples) to provide a portrait of demographic parenthood over the past 110 years. The proposed research will provide periodic sex- and age-specific portraits of parenthood from 1880 to 1990 by race and for sociodemographic groups (for example, migrants and nonmigrants, farm and nonfarm households, high and low levels of education). Change will be assessed for successive periods through synthetic-cohort methods; for recent decades, successive birth cohorts of men and women will also be followed over time.